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A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

theatlantic.com

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Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#51

Post by WalterBright »

kragen wrote: post #50
WalterBright wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most effective way is to take notes on a pad or a spiral notebook. Eventually, run them through a scanner. (How are you going to enter equations, draw arrows and diagrams, etc., with a keyboard? If you have a stylus "works almost as good as a pen!", just use a pen on paper. Yes, I'm old, and I wear a watch, too.)

This is a fascinating challenge. I feel like it's probably possible to enter and edit equations as easily with the keyboard as with a pen; certainly you can do so for numerical expressions, using RPN. I wrote a quick hack at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/rpn-edit#3_1_7_1_15_1_1... that almost does a reasonable job; I think that, although it doesn't quite reach being a usable equation editor, among other things…

I defy anyone to reproduce a chalkboard full of eqvations, diagrams, arrows, etc., with a laptop and keep up with the professor.

Besides, my spiral notebook's battery never gives out, it's light, it's $.79, nobody is going to steal it, it doesn't make any noise, it doesn't distract anyone behind me, it won't break when I drop it, etc. Besides, no notes are complete unless you have a coffee cup ring on it.

Disco is music's greatest achievement, too.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#52

Post by rmc »

egypturnash wrote: post #16
personjerry wrote: post #12

Did shorthand used to be more popular? I remember reading in The Westing Game as a child unfamiliar with English, and had to infer the meaning of the word. The book seemed to assume that its readers (mainly teens) knew the word.

From the article: > For nearly a century, Gregg was an essential part of American society. As recently as the 1970s, almost every high school in the country taught Gregg. Certainly, every business school and most colleges offered Gregg-certified shorthand courses. But Gregg’s decline began when McGraw-Hill bought Gregg Publishing, shortly after John Robert Gregg’s death. [...] The real death knell for Gregg, though,…

Another theory for the decline was the it was mostly women, and smart women, who were working as shorthand writers. As women's lib progressed, those women had much better job oppertunities, and left the field.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#53

Post by kragen »

WalterBright wrote: post #51
kragen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fascinating challenge. I feel like it's probably possible to enter and edit equations as easily with the keyboard as with a pen; certainly you can do so for numerical expressions, using RPN. I wrote a quick hack at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/rpn-edit#3_1_7_1_15_1_1... that almost does a reasonable job; I think that, although it doesn't quite reach being a usable equation editor, among other things…

I defy anyone to reproduce a chalkboard full of eqvations, diagrams, arrows, etc., with a laptop and keep up with the professor. Besides, my spiral notebook's battery never gives out, it's light, it's $.79, nobody is going to steal it, it doesn't make any noise, it doesn't distract anyone behind me, it won't break when I drop it, etc. Besides, no notes are complete unless you have a coffee cup ring on it. Disco is mu…

You raise some good points, and many of them are related to why I take most of my own notes on paper. However, laptops far excel spiral notebooks at their ability to produce coffee rings on your notes; with the latest algorithms, you can produce many such rings per second!

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#54

Post by kqr »

tfm wrote: post #3

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7961385 Top comment starts "While Gregg shorthand is great for English, its not much use for anything technical", which was a timely intervention to stop me running off and implementing a drop-in replacement for the Android keyboard!

Depending on what you mean by "anything technical", I seriously doubt that. Shorthand dominated the world of commerce and law for a long time, and it's not like they don't use a bunch of jargon too. Just come up with (or find someone elses invention of) the important abbreviations and you're all set.

A propely written shorthand note should be readable by other people. Journalists are in some countries required by law to keep their shorthand notes for a certain amount of time, so they can be used as evidence in court (and then obviously read by an uninterested third party.)

If you have to write really, really quickly, then yes, typing your notes up properly soon afterward is a good idea. If you aren't under any sort of time pressure and just casually note things down, you should be able to read it years or decades later.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#55

Post by kqr »

taco_emoji wrote: post #25

> But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: “bed” is written as “b-d”; “act” as “a-k”; “done” as “d-n”. Isn't this a source of collisions? How do you distinguish between bid/bed/bud in Gregg? Or between din/den/done? I have to imagine that context isn't always good enough to help the reader discriminate.

I don't know specifically about Gregg, but shorthand systems tend to have some sort of mechanism for disambiguating when confusion is possible (i.e. when both "bed" and "bud" works in the context, you might want to write out the vowel). Part of being a skilled shorthand user is in knowing instinctively when these confusions can arise and using the disambiguation mechanism.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#56

Post by DanBC »

KateGladstone wrote: post #47
Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were taught to begin all cursive letters with an upward stroke, with even a preceding tail on letters like a and o, as shown here -- http://www.howtowriteincursive.org/tag/cursive-writing/ .

That was a bad idea. Much better: graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-WRITING.1.pdf, briem.net, italic-handwriting.org, studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html, BFHhandwriting.com, handwritingsuccess.com, Lexercise.com, HandwritingThatWorks.com, freehandwriting.net/educational.html

Briem has been criticised for creating "zig zag" handwriting that's hard to read if the writer writes at speed.

And you need to include the http:// if you want those to be links.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-...

http://briem.net

http://italic-handwriting.org

http://studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html

http://BFHhandwriting.com

http://handwritingsuccess.com

http://Lexercise.com

http://HandwritingThatWorks.com

http://freehandwriting.net/educational.html

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#57

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #53
WalterBright wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I defy anyone to reproduce a chalkboard full of eqvations, diagrams, arrows, etc., with a laptop and keep up with the professor. Besides, my spiral notebook's battery never gives out, it's light, it's $.79, nobody is going to steal it, it doesn't make any noise, it doesn't distract anyone behind me, it won't break when I drop it, etc. Besides, no notes are complete unless you have a coffee cup ring on it. Disco is mu…

You raise some good points, and many of them are related to why I take most of my own notes on paper. However, laptops far excel spiral notebooks at their ability to produce coffee rings on your notes; with the latest algorithms, you can produce many such rings per second!

[deleted]

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#58

Post by WalterBright »

quanticle wrote: post #48
WalterBright wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most effective way is to take notes on a pad or a spiral notebook. Eventually, run them through a scanner. (How are you going to enter equations, draw arrows and diagrams, etc., with a keyboard? If you have a stylus "works almost as good as a pen!", just use a pen on paper. Yes, I'm old, and I wear a watch, too.)

That only works if you can 1) write fast and 2) decipher what you wrote earlier. I'm fortunate enough to be able to meet both of of those characteristics, but I know one of my colleagues specifically learned LaTeX and emacs so that he could take notes quickly in math classes. LaTeX for equations, emacs drawing mode for ASCII art diagrams.

My first semester in college I discovered that I could not read my notes. With some effort, I fixed that.

40 years later, I can still read the notes, but I no longer understand them because they have no context (the professor's words). At the time the notes served to remind me of the lectures, but not anymore. I wish I had made audio recordings, but the idea never occurred to me, nor to anyone else.

The lectures are a lost treasure. What a shame.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#59

Post by panglott »

adiabatty wrote: post #26
panglott wrote: post #9

A couple years ago, I learned to read/write Quikscript, which was indirectly inspired by shorthand systems (George Bernard Shaw knew phoneticist Henry Sweet and Pitman shorthand, and endowed an effort at script reform in his will). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript It's harder than you might think to read English in a different script; we have learned through great effort how to read and write the conventional…

Are you up to as-fast-as-Orthodox (en-Latn) for either reading or writing yet?

No, I don't actually handwrite things frequently, and didn't get much practice. More trouble than it was worth, for keeping notes and stuff in. Maybe I'll pick it up again.

Re: A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

#60

Post by vinodkd »

taco_emoji wrote: post #25

> But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: “bed” is written as “b-d”; “act” as “a-k”; “done” as “d-n”. Isn't this a source of collisions? How do you distinguish between bid/bed/bud in Gregg? Or between din/den/done? I have to imagine that context isn't always good enough to help the reader discriminate.

I dont know about Gregg, but in Pitman shorthand, the position of the consonant's outline (as the symbol is called) relative to the line dictates its associated vowel. Above the the line is "ah", on the line is "eh", below is "ee", and so forth. You can adorn the whole outline with dots and/or dashes for vowel sounds on all consonant outlines, especially since its written cursively (ie a whole word is writtent together). However, in practice, you get what the word is from context and experience. My father who was a stenographer made me learn it when i was a kid and to this day I remember the outlines of words quite easily, even though I've never used it professionally.

Edit: A more appropriate question to the part of the article you referred to would be: How do you differentiate between "cot" and "got", for example, because it would be the same outline for c(ie k) and g. The official answer is that you wrote one thinner and the other thicker (which is possible when you use a pencil, which was what was used to write pitman shorthand, anyway). The practical answer is that you get it from context - not all sentences could have both those words equally viable.

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